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Littleton GOP candidate blasted over Twitter 'slur'

By Amelia Pak-Harvey, apak-harvey@lowellsun.com

Updated:
07/06/2016 06:36:22 AM EDT

LITTLETON -- The Republican candidate vying for the Middlesex and Worcester State Senate seat caused a stir on social media this weekend after using the term "faggots" in a tweet supporting Donald Trump.

Littleton resident Ted Busiek, running for state Sen. Jamie Eldridge's seat, quoted a tweet with a video of Trump testifying at a 1993 Congressional Native American affairs subcommittee.

"DONALD TRUMP. Putting self-righteous faggots in their place since 1993," Busiek tweeted on Saturday. "How I love this fellow."

"Ted, your use of hateful homophobic slurs, and homophobia, are unacceptable," Eldridge tweeted back. "You should consider dropping out of race."

Busiek later backed down from using the term, saying that he won't use it if people will take genuine offense to it.

"I don't hate anybody, and I think that the people I represent don't hate anybody," he said.

But he said Eldridge is trying to make it into a LGBT issue, which is not what the comment was about. He said he was using it in a "colloquial sense" to mean someone who is obnoxious.

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"I think that (Eldridge is) a smart-enough guy to know that I wasn't making a comment about gay people, but I doubt that he would ever admit that," he said. "I think it serves a lot better to have a manufactured scandal."

The race is the first time Busiek has entered politics, campaigning for the district that spans 14 towns including Acton, Ayer, Shirley, Harvard and Devens.

Busiek served in the military and said he studied mechanical engineering at Merrimack College. He works on his campaign full time.

The tweet is not Busiek's first eye-catching statement -- in June, he tweeted to Gov. Charlie Baker telling him not to sign the state's transgender bathroom bill.

"These perverts aren't who got you elected, and pandering won't make them your friends," he wrote.

But Busiek stood by that statement, saying that men who insist on going into a ladies' restroom are perverts.

He explained that he's fine with people who want to call themselves transgender, as long as they don't take away the rights of others.

Eldridge called on Busiek to issue an apology to the LGBT community, calling the tweets inappropriate and unacceptable.

"It's one thing to have positions on issues, but another to use very hateful rhetoric directed at a certain community, and that's what he did," Eldridge said.

Eldridge, running for his eighth term in office (he had three terms in the House), is consistently scrutinized on Busiek's Twitter account.

"I think it's accurate to say usually my Republican opponents have been very conservative," Eldridge said. "But I've never had a Republican opponent who used this kind of rhetoric."

Eldridge plans on writing a letter to Massachusetts Republican State Committee Chairwoman Kirsten Hughes, asking her to disavow Busiek's language.

Busiek takes a right-leaning stance on a number of issues -- his website argues that same-sex couples should not be able to adopt children in Massachusetts, noting that orphaned children shouldn't be placed with "unfit foster parents."

"I got to grow up with a mom and dad ... I think that every foster kid deserves the same," he said. "I think what's happening is we're putting the feelings of the same-sex couple community ahead of the best interests of foster kids."

He also wants to protect the right to "free association" -- giving people the right to deny services to others.

"We're seeing really distressing cases around the country of people being put out of business, having their livelihoods, their careers destroyed because, for example, they refuse to cater a homosexual wedding," he said.

That suggestion could extend to people denying services based on race, he said, if people are "stupid and bigoted" enough to do such a thing.

"I think in the free market that we live in, that business is going to wither and die," he said.

A Facebook page for Terra Friedrichs, the race's third candidate, said she agrees with Eldridge's condemnation.

She quoted a statement from Danny Factor, a Green-Rainbow candidate for the 14th Middlesex District representative seat, who brought up his Jewish family's past in Nazi Poland.

"Hateful words soon became hateful acts," he wrote on his Facebook page. "May we always swiftly and loudly object to intolerance and hate wherever and whenever we see it."

Information from the State House News Service was used in this report. Follow Amelia Pak-Harvey on Twitter and Tout @AmeliaPakHarvey.

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